And now suddenly, a Czech population that for twenty years had been generally
cowed into submission reared up in near unanimous revulsion. The Jakes regime's
dread authority dematerialized across the course of the ensuing week. Students
mobilized throughout the country, calling for a general strike on November 27.
Two days after the police riot, Civic Forum was founded and soon took up
residence at the Magic Lantern Theater. During the next several days, one
hundred thousand, three hundred thousand, half a million converged on
Wenceslaus Square to cheer Vaclav Havel and presently Alexander Dubcek as well.
Jakes resigned, and though he was initially replaced by another hardliner,
Karel Urbanek, by November 25 Urbanek was reluctantly announcing the
government's willingness to enter into negotiations with the opposition.

Back in London, [Jan] Kavan couldn't stand being stuck there as his life's universe
was being transfigured in his homeland. On November 25, brandishing the most
current of his passports, he boarded a jet for Prague.

And so it was that he arrived at the Prague airport -- or, rather, I. M. James
arrived. Only this time, according to Kavan, the phony passport set off alarm
bells. Customs officials called the Interior Ministry downtown, which
dispatched a pair of agents who undertook more than twelve hours of strenuous
interrogation (during which, among other things, they established Kavan's true
identity), before grudgingly allowing him into the country at three o'clock the
following morning. They warned him that they'd likely be picking him up again.
And, indeed, three days later (the morning after a successful one-hour general
strike, as the regime's leaders were already deep into the negotiations that
would quickly lead to their supersession), they once again nabbed Kavan, this
time taking him out to an elegant villa in one of the city's leafier
districts.

And here's where things get really fuzzy, here's where things turn truly odd.
Because two years later, after Kavan had been officially denounced as an StB
collaborator and he'd launched an international campaign to clear his name, his
parliamentary opponents illegally leaked a videotape of that second
interrogation or, rather, portions of it. It didn't seem like an interrogation
at all. Its tone was disconcertingly cordial, and, at one point, Jan Kavan and
his StB interlocutors were even seen to be toasting each other with
champagne.